Developed and embellished over four centuries, Ostankino now consists of a magnificent 18th-century palace and theatre, a sprawling park with groves and ponds, and the 17th-century Church of the Holy Trinity. The estate was the property of Count Nikolai Petrovich Sheremetiev (1751-1809), a prominent figure belonging to one of Russia's wealthiest and influential noble families.

Built between 1677-1692, the ornamental church differs in appearance and spirit from the elegance of the palace at Ostankino. Its builder, Prince Mikhail Cherkassky incorporated the Moscow Baroque style in its exterior with a Western-influenced interior. The building's festive appearance includes ceramic tile inlays, white stone carvings, spade-shapped gables, and archvaults displayed against red brick walls.

The carved iconostasis matches the opulent decorative statement of the rest of the church, although its icons demonstrate the decline of Russian iconography as it begins to borrow from the West.

The church was closed by the Soviets in 1933, however, a year later the church was turned over to the Ostankino Estate Museum which was originally created in 1918. From 1980, the church hosted concerts of sacred music.

In 1990, the church resumed regular religious services, and was consecrated by Patriarch Alexei II (1929-2008) on March 23rd, 1991. A restoration of the church followed, sadly however, the lower section of the Royal Doors was all that survived of the original iconostasis.

The Patriarch of Moscow and All Russia, Kirill, who heads the Russian Orthodox Church, has addressed the faithful with his traditional Easter speech.

Christ is Risen, dear brothers and sisters!

I would like to share the joy of the holy day of Easter with all of you. The Lord has indeed saved us all through his resurrection. And in order to comprehend the significance of this for us as mankind we could consider this example. Just imagine that someone innocent took the blame, responsibility and penalty for all the crimes ever committed by all the wrongdoers and rendered them all free by taking their penalty for them. Our Lord Jesus Christ did just the same, yet with one condition – he didn’t open the doors of the prison cells the sinners are contained in, but undid their locks. And now it is our free choice – to step out and be free or remain locked up. In one of the hymns, we praise our risen Savior saying that He smashed open the eternal fetters and chains and freed us of them. But in order for us to step out of that door and become free we need to make our way towards Him, because there is only one way that leads to the door beyond which the freedom lies.

Our circumstances in life, superstitions, all kinds of stereotypes and false values lead us off this path. We often get tempted with other ways to freedom. At times people spend their entire lives pursuing these ways only to find out in the end that they’re still locked up and instead of obtaining freedom have hit the wall. Some may still have the time and energy to resume their search for a way out, while others may give up the hope to escape their imprisonment.

If we turn to Christ, we open the door that He unlocked for us. We become free and empowered by His ways and commandments. We become free to live a full life. This doesn’t require any exhausting effort. It only takes to believe that Our Lord Jesus Christ has risen and saved us. It only takes to believe that the door is open. It only takes to believe that living by His will is the true freedom while any other way is the opposite.

And when we begin to realize this, a whole new life opens to us. We find it easier to be good to people, refrain from foul words or judgments and make our way through life without hurting other people or crippling them.

We discover that we are able to love, be faithful, and carry the truth into the world. That’s what life in Christ means, that’s what the true freedom is. Maintaining freedom isn’t easy. Each one of us knows how difficult it is for a state to protect its freedom and independence. It sometimes takes a lot of hard work. Protecting one’s freedom from numerous temptations and illusions that the dark powers are sending our way to drive us off the way to salvation isn’t easy just the same way.

The holy day of Easter is a celebration of victory and freedom. Let’s embrace this holy day with these feelings and make the decision, as much as we can, to start making our way towards our risen Savior through the door that He gracefully opened for us by His holy deeds of mercy and truth – and we can do so by helping those who need our help, promoting peace, justice and love among all of us.

18th Century on Screen: Catherine II and Friedrich IITopic: Exhibitions

The National Museum and Park Tsaritsyno is to host an international exhibition on the May 28, uniting history and cinema.

For the first time, the halls of Khlebny Dom in Tsaritsyno Park will simultaneously host a collection of historical objects from the 18th century and a film festival, depicting people and life of those times. This year’s exhibition focuses on the figures of the Russian Empress Catherine II and Prussian Emperor Friedrich II — and, of course, on the ‘gallant 18th century’.

Mysterious lives of these outstanding monarchs have always been of interest to historians and writers. Their images have been inspired many paintings and sculptures. In the 20th century they fascinated filmmakers. Not only in Russia and Germany, but also in Hollywood, London, even Japan and the Netherlands fil; romantic dramas and epic series about the XVIII century and its main protagonists, designing marvellous costumes and adventures. Of course, every decade new political subtexts and cultural stereotypes are being attributed to those historical events.

The main purpose of the exhibition is not to unveil the mistakes of popular cinema culture, but to show the difference and similarities between history and fiction.

The exhibition allows its guests to compare the historical and fictitious parts of 18th century. Real objects (such as furniture, costumes, kitchenware, scientific tools, books), pictures (paintings, portraits, maps), documents of those times will show the real life of the 18th century monarchs of Prussia and Russia. As for the fictional reality, the visitors will be able to see objects that were used during the filming process (screenplays, storyboards, designed costumes, wigs and makeups, cameras and light equipment, photo and video casting materials). The visitors will also be able to watch the editing process.

Informative yet spectacular exhibition will allow the visitors to fully submerge into historical cinema, during the screenings of most popular films about Catherine II, Friedrich II and their century, workshops on costume making and makeups, musical concerts. Many films will be shown in Russia for the first time.

The programme of “18th century on screen: Catherine II and Friedrich II” was prepared by the State Central Cinema Museum, German Goethe Cultural Centre (Goethe Institute) and Museum of Cinema (Potsdam) as part of the Year of Germany in Russia. Major Russian museums and artistic foundations, such as the Mosfilm Studios, will be involved in the project, along with famous artists and filmmakers from Moscow and St Petersburg.

Kuban Cossacks from Return Collection of Emblems and Regalia to RussiaTopic: Cossacks

Kuban Cossacks were entrusted as private guards to Emperor Nicholas II and his family

Thanks to collaboration and solidarity of Alexander Pevnev, the ataman of Kuban Cossack army abroad, over 300 military regalia and emblems have been returned to Russia. In Moscow the ataman was received by Vladimir Medinsky, Minister of Culture and head of the Russian Historical and Military Foundation.

According to the website of the Russian Historical and Military Foundation (RHMF), the question of returning sacred war regalia had been raised several times on the international level, but has become close to its resolution only in the recent years. In particular, with the help of ataman Alexander Pevnev in spring 2013 a large collection has been transferred back to Russia, including 38 Cossack emblems, an original document signed by Catherine II granting the landowner rights to the Cossacks, and about 300 items of memorabilia overall.

The letter from Pevnev to Medinsky says: “I would like to express my sincere gratitude for your kind reception and hospitality to me personally and to the entire delegation of the Cossack army abroad during our stay in Moscow... We are hoping for the long-term and fruitful collaboration in order to preserve the Russian culture and return its historical and cultural treasures back to Russia”.

It is planned to establish secure and permanent connections with the Cossacks abroad, reports RHMF.

The headquarters of the Kuban Cossack army abroad is stationed in New Jersey, and multiple regalia of the Cossack army taken from Russia by the ataman Vyacheslav Naumenko are stored there.

A relative of Russia’s deposed royal family visits Jerusalem and finds kinship in the Jewish search for home and homeland.

A participant at a recent genteel dinner in Jerusalem could not help being reminded of the scene from ”Fiddler on the Roof” in which the rabbi of Anatevka answers a congregant asking if there was a special blessing for the czar of Russia.

Of course, answers the rabbi. “May God bless and keep the czar… far away from us!”

Nearby sat Dimitri Romanovich Romanov — one of those Romanovs — the towering and gracious 87-year-old great-great-grandson of Czar Nicholas I, who died in 1855.

After dinner, Romanov mused about his own history and that of Israel, where he had just arrived for the first time, and about the nature of statelessness.

Dimitri Romanov was born in 1926, 18 years after Bolshevik revolutionaries murdered the last czar of Russia and his family at Ekaterinburg and threw their bodies into an abandoned mine shaft. The surviving Romanov grand duchesses and grand dukes along with the rest of the extended royal family, including Dimitri’s father, Prince Roman Petrovich, fled Russia, never to return.

Romanov and his wife, Dorrit Reventlow, who wore an elegant salmon dress and golden slippers, were early in a 36-hour sojourn in the country, part of a round-the-world journey on a cruise ship called the Seaborne Quest. They were being given a whirlwind tour of which the dinner — at an unmarked and luxurious Jerusalem establishment called Spoons, near Montefiore’s windmill — was part. There was Italian cabbage, Israeli wine, superb artichoke soup, and candlesticks the size of modest missile silos.

Romanov admitted he had not formed much of an impression of the country in the several hours that had elapsed since his arrival. He was surprised at how green it was, he said, and how hilly: “I always thought it would be more flat.”

Jerusalem is not entirely foreign to a Romanov visitor. The attractions before dinner included a visit to the grave of a relative, Elizabeth Feodorovna, the last czar’s sister-in-law and a Russian Orthodox saint, at a church on the Mount of Olives. (Among the city’s other Romanov-era relics is a building downtown known as Sergei’s Courtyard, which was built for Russian pilgrims and named for Grand Duke Sergei, brother of Czar Alexander III.)

Born in France and raised across Europe and, for a time, in Alexandria. Romanov spent his life, however, not as royalty but as a banker. As a young man, he recalled, he never had much interest in the complexities of the Romanov lineage, less a family tree than a chaotic forest of intersecting and competing lines linked in bewildering ways to the other active and defunct royal houses of Europe. “I was totally uninterested to know who the Princess of Baden Baden was,” he said. This disinterest also means the prince does not know what number he is in line for the British throne; his wife says he is “around 2,000th.”

Romanov returned to the country his family ruled for centuries for the first time only after the fall of Communism, when he was in his 60s.

“For me, ‘returning’ to Russia is a misnomer — I can’t return to a country I never visited before,” he said.

He has lived half of his life in Copenhagen, but until 23 years ago he held no citizenship at all. Then a friend suggested that he finally become a Danish citizen — “You’ll feel at home,” she promised. This friend, Margaret, was the queen of Denmark, so he obliged.

“It’s important to be a citizen of something, like a Jew who comes from Yemen or Morocco and comes here and becomes a citizen — it’s important to be a part of society. I felt that in Denmark for the first time in my life,” he said.

In the middle of dinner, talk turned to Jewish history and the prince was reminded of a visit he once made to Warsaw, where he was touched by the story of the Jewish partisans who took part in the uprising in that city’s ghetto during WWII. He proposed a toast to them.

“I thought I must express my feelings about these young people fighting Nazism, dreaming that one day those who lived would come back to Israel,” he said afterward.

Of course, he noted, they had never actually been to Israel. “How can you go back if you’ve never been?” he wondered. “I suppose it’s in your blood.”

The Oxford University Russian Society will host a talk by Prince Michael of Kent on Thursday, 2nd May, at Merton College.

Maxim Kotenev, adviser to the society, anticipates that the Prince will talk about his visit to St Petersburg for the burial of the Tsar and his family, and might make a comparison between the British and Russian royal families.

Kotenev added that he would be interested to hear the Prince’s “view on the Queen, her role and some internal stories of his encounters with the Queen”.

“Prince Michael of Kent is interesting for the Russian Society because of his profile”, said Kotenev. The Prince is related to Russian royal family and involved in a large number of non-profit charities in Russia. “He has close links with Russia, speaks Russian fluently and has travelled to Russia several times”, added Kotenev.

Russian Society President Anna Danshina first learnt about Prince Michael’s links to Russia when organising the Imperial Gardens of Russia festival in St Petersburg, which is supported by the Royal Highness Prince Michael of Kent Charitable Foundation. Danshina commented that: “I was very fascinated by Prince Michael’s interest in Russia and the charitable work of the Prince Michael of Kent Foundation in the country.”

The Prince is devoted to several charity, arts and education organisations in Russia. Among them is the St. Petersburg based Nochlezhka Charity Foundation, which provides shelter and food for homeless people. He is also a patron for the Russian National Orchestra and the Russo-British Chamber of Commerce and holds an Honorary Doctorate from the Plekhanov Russian Academy of Economics and St Petersburg University of Humanities and Social Sciences.

The Prince is a cousin of Queen Elizabeth II and his mother, Princess Marina, was the daughter of Grand Duchess Helen Vladimirovna of Russia. “He is named after the brother of Russian Tsar Nicholas II and in some way he looks like Nicholas II”, said Kotenev.

The Russian Society was founded in 1909 by a member of the Russian royal family, Prince Felix Yusupov, who studied at University College. Prince Felix is known for having participated in the assassination of Grigori Rasputin, the faith healer of Tsar Nicholas II.

The State Hermitage Museum in St Petersburg will branch out into the accommodation business this summer, with the opening of a new, branded luxury retreat.

The State Hermitage Hotel will be the latest gilded addition to a city that is not short on five-star hideaways. Equipped with 126 rooms, a large spa and a gourmet restaurant named after one of Russia’s most celebrated rulers, it is likely to challenge the city’s long-established hotel dames, such as the Grand Hotel Europe and the Hotel Astoria.

Crucially, the hotel will not be part of the Hermitage complex.

While the fabled gallery preens alongside the river at Dvortsovaya Naberezhnaya, the hotel will sit about a mile to the south-east, on Pravda Ulitsa (street). It will be built into a former merchant’s home that has also been used as a theatre and a cultural centre, but had fallen into disrepair.

Guests will be able to use a shuttle service that will ferry them to the museum, and also book tickets for the Hermitage in the lobby – a short-cut which will save them a meeting with the gallery’s notoriously long queues (in which you can wait for up to two hours).

The hotel’s design will pay tribute to the Winter Palace portion of The Hermitage.

Employees will wear uniforms modelled upon the style that would have been sported by palace staff under the Tsar – while china based upon designs that would have been deployed for state banquets will be used in the restaurants.

The main restaurant will also be named after Catherine the Great, the fearsome empress who ruled Russia and its empire between 1762 and 1796, and founded the Hermitage in 1764.

On April 29th, 2013, one of the rooms of the Romanov Dynasty display at the Catherine Palace was decorated with palms, blooming hydrangeas and poecilophyllousphilodendrons, put in jardinières (flower stands) made after a mid-19th-century original, marking the 195th birth anniversary of Emperor Alexander II.

The plant composition titled “An Artful Garden” complies with the canons of the epoch when jardinières like these were a must-have element of a room with greenery.

A variety of plants, often exotic ones, would liven up and romaticize an interior – especially in a country that lies snow-covered almost half a year. Lovingly cultivated, the “green guests from overseas” were often organized into beautiful indoor gardens.

Recollecting a travel to cold Russia in his Voyage en Russie (1867), the French writer Théophile Gautier called flowers “the true luxury” that Russians loved to fill their houses with, “It does feel like the North Pole outside, but inside it's like the tropics”.

Moscow Proposes Chapel in Honour of the Romanov DynastyTopic: Russian Church

The Strastnoi (of the Passion) Convent was destroyed by the Soviets in 1937

The monument to the poet Alexander Pushkin from Pushkin square in the center of the Russian capital may be moved from its current site, reported to Interfax a source in the Moscow State Duma.

"It has been proposed to move the monument to Pushkin and to build a commemorative Chapel to the Strastnoi (of the Passion) Convent and to the first tsars of the house of Romanov: Michael Feodorovich (reigned from 1613 to 1645) and Alexei Mikhailovich (1645-1676) on its site," said a spokesman of Interfax.

He noted that the monument to A. Pushkin in 1880 was raised on the square at the beginning of the Tverskoy boulevard but in 1950 it was moved to another side of Gorky street (present-day Tverskaya street) and installed on the site of the Convent's demolished belltower.

The spokesman also added that the Commission at the Moscow State Duma had received a proposal to install a commemorative plaque to the human rights lawyer Stanislav Markelov and the journalist Anastasia Baburova on the site of their murder—near house No–1 on Prechistenka street.

"Most probably, the Moscow State Duma's Commission for Monumental Art will consider these proposals after the May holidays. It is still difficult to state what kind of a decision will be made on these two proposals, but the commission members are categorical as regards the moving of monuments," said the agency's spokesman.

Orthodox Christians have been holding prayer meetings and Cross processions on the Pushkin square for years calling to restore the Strastnoi Convent. According to them, underground on the site are the remains of ascetic nuns from the Convent, as well as foundations of destroyed monastery buildings. In summer 2012, a commemorative plaque to the Strastnoi Convent was raised on the Pushkin square.

The Convent was founded in the 17th century on the very historical site where the miraculous icon of the Mother of God of the Passion (which was brought to the capital from the Nizhny Novgorod region) had been solemnly met. This icon, famous for its healing of the sick, is thus called because two Angels with instruments of Christ's sufferings (passion)—spears and the Cross—are depicted on it next to the Most Holy Theotokos.

When the Napoleon's army hastily left Moscow, it was in this Convent that the first thanksgiving service to the Savior for miraculous deliverance from the invaders was celebrated. Also, according to tradition, the first Church bell resounded from the belltower of the Strastnoi Convent after the enemy had gone away. The central anti-religious museum was opened on the territory of the Convent in 1929, and the buildings of the Convent were demolished in 1937.

Bailiffs have seized a bronze statue of Emperor Nicholas II as part of of the assets of a Siberian distilleryfacing bankruptcy procedure, which may be sold over unpaid debt, a spokeswoman for the regional bailiffs service, Natalya Fomina, told RIA Novosti.

The 500-kg bust was erected in 2010 on a massive granite pedestal in the village of Shushenskoe in the southern Siberian Krasnoyarsk region by “Shushenskaya Marka,” one of the largest vodka producers in the region.

A local court has started hearings following a claim from Russia’s largest bank Sberbank against the distillery over its failure to pay back a loan and issued a warrant for the seizure of its property.

Ironically, the monument to the last Russian tsar was erected in the village where Communist leader Vladimir Lenin spent three years in exile in the end of XIX century for revolutionary activity against his rule.

For more information on this monument, please refer to my original article (+ VIDEO) posted at Royal Russia News on January 1st, 2011: